OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
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Praying mantises are specialized predators with several visual adaptations to detect and capture prey. In this talk, I will talk about three adaptations: stereo vision, second-order motion detection and sustained attention. We tested mantises with virtual 3D targets and showed that mantis stereopsis enables prey capture in complex scenes but relies on a different mechanism to that seen in primates. We next tested their responses to different forms of motion and demonstrated the important of second-order motion for prey detection by not prey capture. Finally, we tested the ability of mantises to attend to prey once they become stationary and found that mantises are capable of long-term sustained attention that depends on stereoscopic disparity. I will discuss the implications for real world behaviour and the benefits of a comparative approach towards understanding visual cognition.
